Formulated by Pierre Bourdieu, the term ‘cultural capital’ refers to the ideas, symbols, preferences, and tastes that can be tactically put in use as a resource for social action. These ideas and knowledge are drawn upon by individuals as they take part in their roles within the social arena and range from etiquette rules to the ability to read and write effectively for successful communication. In other words, cultural capital is the universal cultural background, disposition, as well as skills, that are transferred from generation to generation. It represents the ways in which people talk, how they socialize, act, perform their language practices, as well as their code of dressing, behaviors, and shared values. Through analogy with other forms of capital such as economic capital, cultural capital resources can be accumulated, invested, and converted into various forms. Consequently, individuals in upper social stratum can provide their children with various cultural competencies and language that offer them a likelihood of success not only in their education but also in their career life. On the other hand, working-class students who lack access to cultural recourses are likely to be unsuccessful in their academics, which is a factor that describes how our educational systems produce social class inequalities. According to Bourdieu, the distribution of cultural and economic capital reinforces each other. Success in academics, which reflects the original cultural capital, is the only means in which well-paid occupations can be achieved. The earnings acquired from high paying professions allow those who are successful to enroll their children in private educational systems with the aim of enhancing the opportunities for their educational accomplishment.
Cultural capital can be broken down into three categories including embodied cultural capital, objectified cultural capital, and institutionalized cultural capital. Embodied cultural capital refers to the skills and properties that an individual learns from his or her family. A superb example of this type of cultural capital is language. As a child, the first language is learned from the primary caregiver and the environment in which they grow up. The child’s ability to communicate efficiently plays an important part, especially when they join the school. Growing up in a household or environment that fosters effective communication equips the child with adequate skills required for learning. The languages children are exposed to also play a significant role and can be both advantageous and disadvantageous upon school entry. The environment where only one language is privileged, for instance, English, can make the cultural capital of any other language to be of little or no significance. In addition, exposing children to more than one language can be disadvantageous in cases where multiple languages hinder fluency of the preferred language.
Cultural capital in the objectified state manifests itself in all forms of the coherent, autonomous world which, even being the product of chronological action, possesses its laws, as well as the surpassing personal wills. Objectified cultural capital consists of forms of physical objects which symbolically express cultural capital. An example of a household that is rich in objectified cultural capital is a home that has access to books, paintings, and monuments, as well as other works of art. The last category of cultural capital is the institutionalized cultural capital, which is characterized by academic qualifications. Individuals enroll in learning institutions in order to acquire diplomas and other qualifications. They are pieces of papers that symbolize or tell other members of the society that they are educated and skillful in their respective majors and hence are worthy of employment. The papers representing their academic qualifications give various institutions, such as the labor market, opportunities to compare and contrast them qu